This year, East Side Marketplace ran a special where, after spending a certain amount of money from late October to early November, customers could turn in their receipts for a free turkey. My roommates and I, as four students off meal plan and with a kitchen, were able to get two after our weekly grocery trips. In other words, I finally had the perfect excuse to want to take on the challenge of cooking Thanksgiving dinner in a dorm room kitchen.

11:00 a.m., Sunday We head to East Side Marketplace, picking up our free turkeys (one of which we gave to another friend for her Thanksgiving dinner). It turns out the free turkeys were frozen, which would never thaw in one day, so we took a voucher to get $20 off of a refrigerated turkey breast (which cooks faster and was cheaper, so win-win there).

11:08 a.m. A very nice woman at the deli counter calls me “papa.” It’s going to be a good Thanksgiving indeed.

11:20 a.m. We pick up the other necessary items: stuffing, potatoes, cranberries.

11:33 a.m. It takes two employees plus myself to find gravy in a jar.

11:35 a.m. Found it.

11:55 a.m. We return and unpack our groceries. One of my roommates is a vegan and has prepared well for dinner later (see below).

Pre-registration is upon us once again. In case you haven’t even thought about pre-registering because it’s freaking November and who are you to think more than an hour in advance, here’s your warning: Seniors register at 8 a.m. Tuesday (tomorrow), juniors on Wednesday, sophomores on Thursday and first-years on Friday.

Whether you’re deciding between that upper-level CS class and an experimental literary arts class or an 8 a.m. Monday lecture and a Friday afternoon seminar, BlogDH is here to help. Just remember: the secret to a great schedule is selecting courses based on their name alone.

You need a costume that’s low-budget. You need a costume that’s last-minute. And you need a costume that’s Brown-specific. Fear not: you can have your cake candy and eat it too. When it’s an hour before Monster Ball/RISD Ball/that MoChamp pregame and there’s nothing in sight but your half-finished lab report and that sky photo t-shirt, BlogDH has got you covered.

The Main Green

You will need:

Green clothes

A frisbee

A picnic basket/tapestry/MacBook Air

Dress up in green clothes, stick a frisbee on your head, and carry something Main Green-related around for the night. Note: the Frisbee is essential. Otherwise you may be mistaken for Wriston/Simmons/Pembroke Green, which is not what you’re going for here.

Excited for Halloween? So are we. Of course, the only thing scarier than a CS course is being left without a killer playlist for the big day. Whether you’re ready to put on your sexiest Donald Trump costume and crash every ball on RISD’s campus, or curl up with an armful of Reese’s and watch reruns of American Horror Story: Asylum, BlogDH has you covered with the Halloween musical essentials. Candy not included.

Since arriving in September, you may have noticed that many things on Brown’s campus had changed from last year. Francesca’s on Thayer replaced what was once chainlink fences and crumbling cement, “Imagine Brown 250+” is gone, and, most notably, the mailroom has undergone a dramatic makeover. Elizabeth Gentry, Assistant Vice President of Business and Financial Services, sat down with BlogDH to discuss what happened, why it happened, and where to finally find that mailroom playlist.

Gentry first explains that most first-years don’t realize what the mail system was like last year. “We’ve long outgrown our space, especially during peak times, at the start of semester, especially the start of the year. So, we had two locations: the mailroom in J. Walter Wilson, and what used to be ‘The Gate.’ The system turned out to be very confusing for many students. It just wasn’t as efficient as it could be.”

Packages were delivered to either location based on which carrier (USPS, UPS, FedEx, to name a few) delivered them, but as Gentry points out, this system was always so simple. “UPS began this program called ‘The Last Mile,’ where UPS would deliver your package to, say, the US Post Office, which would bring it the rest of the way to us. So, to the student, the carrier is UPS, but to us, the carrier is USPS. It was confusing.”

Not to mention, package deliveries skyrocketed. “We began getting direct deliveries from Amazon,” Gentry notes. “They didn’t notify us beforehand, but one day we got five pallets [pictured below] full of shipments directly from the Amazon fulfillment center, because so many deliveries were coming straight to us. I’m talking pallets as tall as me, five of them. And they just kept coming.”